Douglas Gordon (b. 1966, Glasgow, Scotland) is an internationally acclaimed artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans video, film, installation, sculpture, photography, text, and sound. Known for his conceptual rigor and psychological depth, Gordon’s work explores themes of memory, morality, duality, and the disruption of perception. Using found footage, literary references, religious symbolism, and his own recordings, he probes the human condition through acts of distortion and repetition.Gordon studied sculpture and environmental art at the Glasgow School of Art (1984–88) and earned his MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1988–90), where he began engaging deeply with the cinematic medium. His breakthrough work, 24 Hour Psycho (1993), stretched Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film to a full day’s duration, dramatically altering its psychological impact and challenging viewers' relationship to time and narrative.Binary oppositions—good and evil, light and dark, life and death—are central to Gordon’s work, often explored through haunting juxtapositions and conceptual subversion. In Three Inches Black (1997), a tattooed fingertip becomes a meditation on violence and intimacy. In Between Darkness and Light (after William Blake) (1997), he screens a film about divine revelation simultaneously with one about demonic possession, blending sacred and profane.Gordon’s work has been widely exhibited in major institutions including MoMA New York, Tate Britain, Hayward Gallery, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and ARoS Aarhus. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and participated in Documenta 14 (2017). He received the Turner Prize in 1996 and has also been recognized at major film festivals including Cannes, Venice, and Toronto.

Douglas Gordon

Throughout his diverse practice—spanning photography, video, performance, sound, and text-based work—Douglas Gordon recontextualizes familiar images and artworks, distorting time, language, and other aesthetic aspects to challenge viewers’ perception, expectation, and memory.

Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) investigates time, mortality, collective memory, and identity through photography, installations, video art, as well as sculpture and texts. By exploring a variety of mediums and art forms, Gordon readjusts scenes, tinkers with time, and appropriates cultural sources.

Skulls are a recurring subject in Gorgon´s production: for several years, the artist has been collecting skulls, into which he has five-pointed stars incised for each year of his life. Taken from Re-Object/Mythos, a portfolio of 6, Fourty is a photograph on baryta paper with cut-out holes, mounted on acrylic mirror. The work depicts a skull incised with forty stars, one for each year of the artist’s life at the time of its creation. The cutout eyes disclose a mirror, transforming the photograph into a contemporary memento mori which eerily embraces the viewer.

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“ If you want to find the truth in something, take it apart piece by piece, then put it back together with the detail of a forensic scientist. „

—Douglas Gordon